10/23/22

Expert: more megafires are coming to the Black Hills

In August, 2000 Newcastle, Wyoming resident, Janice Stevenson stopped her car to pee, lit a cigarette then dropped a match into dry grasses near Jasper Cave in the southern Black Hills. 

Because part of the resulting 83,508 acre wildfire burned on Forest Service land she was sentenced to ten years on federal charges and to twenty five years for second-degree arson in state court. Her attorneys argued that childhood abuse, thirty suicide attempts plus a leg amputation led to previous fire starts and suspicion for lighting the 1988 Westberry Trails Fire that destroyed 15 homes, 45 outbuildings, 40 vehicles and burned almost 5,000 acres near Rapid City. 

Jim Furnish was deputy chief of the US Forest Service from 1999 to 2002 and believes all the fuel treatments in the area before the Jasper Fire were entirely ineffective in preventing the blaze.

Ponderosa pine sucks billions of gallons from aquifer recharges, needles absorb heat and accelerate snow melt while aspen leaves reflect sunlight in the summer months and hold snowpacks in winter. Insects like the mountain pine beetle and spruce bud worm can help promote drought- and fire-tolerant species like aspen. 

Dense stands of water-sucking, heat island-creating ponderosa pine concentrate volatile organic compounds or VOCs that become explosive under hot and dry conditions. The aerosols are like charcoal starter fumes just waiting for a spark. 

According to Todd Pechota, a retired forest fire management officer for the Black Hills National Forest who responded to the Jasper Fire, the next megafire in the Black Hills is just a matter of when.
Pechota also said he feels a forest fire the size of Jasper will “probably be in September or the spring, not the months of June through August.” Citing several reasons for his logic about why we’ll see another Jasper Fire, his main point was that there are “a fraction of resources available in summer,” he said. Pechota also provided a historical perspective of the Jasper Fire that included a reminder that despite the Hell Canyon area’s “April 2000 blizzard of two and a half feet of snow, that summer’s hot and dry conditions set a deteriorating stage for, first, the July 2000 fire near Hot Springs that burned 7,000 acres, and then the Jasper Fire,” Pechota said. Pechota further clarified that the number of fire starts in the Hell Canyon area in the year 2000 jumped from a yearly average of 55 to 1,000 fire starts that year. [War Criminal County Chronicle]
It's the view of this interested party that Janice Stevenson is a scapegoat for decades of land management failures endemic to South Dakota politics and to the Republican supermajority that coddles Jim Neiman.

Image: interested party.

3 comments:

All Mammal said...

The same invasive pine wreaking destruction in the Black Hills almost did the town of Johannesburg, South Africa in not that long ago. The roots bust through solid rock to get at the water shed and Johannesburg had a ‘day-til-dry’ countdown when they decided to go on offense and rip as many juvenile pine trees out by the roots as possible. They were down to a handful of days until they had no water, much like Rapid City.

It makes me wonder if the white men who brought this destructive pine to these exact spots knew exactly what genocidal tactics they were employing? We need to study what the South Africans did to save their city and get to it. As stewards, we need to start by baring teeth at the drillers and miners wanting to jeopardize the integrity of the delicate shale formations that create our precious watershed. At the same time, we need to destroy the pine. It is only a matter of water and death.

All Mammal said...

I’m so sorry, it was Cape Town, South Africa. Not Johannesburg. I get them mixed up all the time. Sorry.

larry kurtz said...

One of my surviving uncles taught Veterinary Medicine at the University of Minnesota and has long professed the influence of genetics in how humans manipulate the environment and that we don’t always get it right so we reap whatever harvests we’ve sown no matter how misshapen.